I recently got a Makerbot 3D printer, and I’ve been having a whole lot of fun using it to make silly things.
Last night, though, I made my first legitimately beautiful object: The Maltese Falcon.
It took about seven hours to make, and these pictures show it inside my Replicator 2 (yes, I have a Replicator in my office. No, it does not make Tea, Earl Grey, Hot … yet), after I cleaned off the supports and took it off the raft.
It turns out the supports were very important. Here’s what happened when I tried to print it without the supports:
Oops.
For those of you who are interested in specs, I did this with 5% infill, 3 shells, on high resolution.
And for those of you who are interested in all the stuff I’ve made so far, here’s most of my collection:
All these pictures, except the Maltese Failure, can be embiggened by clicking on them.
I used to subscribe to a lot of magazines, but over the years I’ve let all the subscriptions lapse. If I really want to read something, I pick it up on a newsstand, or read it online. One of the great things about my Kindle, for instance, is how I can grab an individual issue of something like The Nation or Mother Jones when I’m on vacation, and not have to deal with another physical piece of media that’s going to take up space in my bag.
I’ve found that I most frequently read magazines when I’m on airplanes (which is about twice a month, it turns out), so I usually pick up the latest WIRED or Scientific American or Mental_Floss when I’m on my way to the gate, read it, and leave it behind for the next passenger to enjoy.
But I know that magazines rely on subscriptions, and subscribing to things I really like is a good way to support that publication’s writers, editors, and staff, so I recently went ahead and subscribed to Popular Science and Mental Floss. When I signed up, I specifically requested that my information not be shared, rented, given, sold, gifted, delivered, or handed off in a dark alleyway dead drop to any third parties. Because I know that publishers don’t always honor these requests, I use unique and humorous names when I subscribe to magazines, so I know who isn’t honoring my requests.
So far, Mental_Floss is doing a great job not sharing my information. But Popular Science? Not so much. this delightful bit of junk mail showed up yesterday, along with my latest issue:
This is incredibly annoying, and violates the trust I placed in the magazine when I decided to give them my money. Awesomeface Wheaton will not be renewing his subscription, and now I get to enjoy months of telling all the third parties that Popular Science gave my information to that I don’t want their bullshit.
Look, print publications, you’re fighting with Internet and digital for eyeballs every single day. When you do shit like this, it just hastens your demise.
Don’t be a dick, magazine publishers. Do not share my information means do not share my information.
I just haven’t had any Christmas Spirit this year. We’ve both been very busy, had an unexpected death in the family, and have sort of felt like doing Christmas stuff (decorating, etc.) was just Another Fucking Thing To Deal With™.
We weren’t unhappy about it or anything, but we don’t give gifts in our family, we aren’t religious, and with the kids out of the house, were just sort of treating Christmas like it was another day.
When I woke up this morning, though, something was different. Decorating for Christmas, and having a nice Christmas dinner with Anne and Nolan (Ryan’s out of town) became something I wanted to do, instead of something I felt like I was supposed to do, because Christmas.
I woke up about 2 hours before Anne, which is a Christmas Miracle in itself, and after she was sufficiently filled with coffee, I walked into the living room and sat down next to her.
“I have a thought,” I began.
“Uh-oh…” she said. I smiled.
“I know we haven’t felt like doing anything Christmas-y, but … I kind of want to just put up our tree, and a couple of decorations.” I said.
“I am so glad you said that,” she said, “because I woke up feeling exactly the same way. I think it would be really sad for Nolan to come over tomorrow, and we don’t have anything in our house that says ‘it’s Christmas! Yay!'”
“So how about if we go to the store, get some food for a quiet dinner tonight with just the two of us, and then get something for dinner tomorrow?”
“I’d love that,” she said.
So a few hours later, we went to the store, with everyone else in the world, and got some food for a nice, quiet, and dare I say ROMANTIC dinner tonight. We also decided to recreate our Thanksgiving dinner for Christmas dinner, because it was damn tasty.
We got home after a surprisingly relaxed shopping experience with everyone else in the world, and I said, “Mrs. Wheaton, would you like to share the joyous holiday tradition of walking into the backyard and getting the Christmas tree out of the shed?”*
“I would love that, Mister Wheaton.”
We walked up into the backyard, where I unlocked the shed, and began the traditional process of extricating the tree from where it lives 50 weeks out of the year. Along the way, I knocked over several cans of paint. Two of them cracked and dumped their contents all over the floor.
“Oh yeah!” I said, “Now it’s CHRISTMAS!”
“I’ll go get some paper towels…” Anne said.
Once we cleaned that up, we brought the tree into the house. I assembled it in the traditional Christmas way, and we stood back to look at it. We decided that it was good.**
I think the tree had been up for three minutes when our Cat, Luna, made some plans.
Literally seconds later:
Then Marlowe saw her, ran over to see what the heck was going on, scared the shit out of Luna, causing Luna to launch herself out of the tree, to be chased across the living room by the puppy.
With a cat-free tree, I took another picture:
You’ll find one in every fake tree, you’ll see.
The year we got the fake tree, I was filled with regret, because the house didn’t smell like Christmas at all. Ryan, who had just gotten his driver’s license, drove himself to the gas station, bought these air fresheners, and hung them on the tree for us. As moved and happy I was by his gesture, we had to hang them outside for about two weeks, because holy shit do those things have a pungent smell that is nothing like pine but is actually like radioactive death trees.
Anne and I hung more ornaments on the tree, and then we hung up a few — a very few — decorations around the house. Then, when we felt like we were done, I put Noel the Christmas Walrus on the tree to make everything official:
Then, I walked into the kitchen and saw that Luna was recovering from her adventure:
A tiny box that barely holds you is the perfect place to relax after climbing a fake Christmas tree.
I turned on the broiler, seasoned the steaks we planned to have for dinner, and opened a bottle of wine. Anne came in and joined me.
“You know what,” I said, “I’m really, really happy.”
“Me too.”
“I’m so happy that we decorated our house just a little bit, and put up a tree, because we wanted to, instead of doing it because we felt like we had to.”
“Yeah,” she said, “this is something we chose to do, and who cares if it happened the night before Christmas, instead of three weeks go?”
“I’m really glad we did this,” I said.
“So am I,” she said.
I leaned in and kissed her. “This feels like our first post-kids Christmas,” I said, “with just the two of us doing this because it was fun and festive for us.”
“Totally,” she said.
We looked at each other for a minute.
“I want to just check in with the kids,” I said.
She laughed. “Okay.”
I traded text messages with Ryan and Nolan, we wished each other a happy Christmas Eve, and then I got an idea.
“DUDE! I saw this on Tumblr a couple weeks ago, and I want to try it.” I ran to my office, while Anne stood, confused and confused***, in the kitchen. I grabbed my tripod and my camera.
I set it up in the living room, and I took some pictures:
Warp speed, Mister Crusher.I’M A CHRISTMAS TREE.Noel The Christmas Walrus is cleared for blastoff.
I was pretty happy with the way the pictures turned out, and I came into my office to post them while Anne wrapped a couple of gifts for the kids****.
Then I rejoined her in the living room to take one more picture that would let us say Merry Christmas (or Happy Winter Festival of your choice) to all of you who are reading this, from us here on Team Wheaton:
Marlowe! Look at the camera!Okay, just wait and wear your antlers because it’s cute…Anne: I think we got it. Me: I think it looks like you’ve got her in a choke hold.There it is. We’re really laughing that hard.
Yeah, pictures with a puppy are pretty hilarious…
Did you make steak for dinner? I like steak for dinner.
But Seamus can do a super good sit, and he wants you to have a Merry Christmas.
And so do I. I hope you spend the holidays with people you love, who love you back.
*A few years ago, we got a fake tree, because I am so stupidly paranoid about getting a real tree that somehow explodes into a fireball for some reason and ruins Christmas like a kid who points out that Grandma just said something that’s really super racist at Christmas dinner. Not that I know anything about that at all.
**I also realized that this one little bit of lights that never seemed to light up, even though all the wires checked out and all the bulbs were in place, didn’t light up because we never plugged it in. The plug was wrapped around itself in a way that just hid it, and I never saw it until tonight. I texted Ryan, “dude. I am amazing”, and told him the story. “Our family is so smart, and so dumb at the same time,” he replied. “THAT is Wheaton Thinking,” I said.
***And also confused.
****We don’t give gifts to each other. We do give a couple little things to the kids.
Anne loves puns more than anything else in the world. She is so easily amused, she’ll spend hours trying to craft the best pun, and always has something ready for any situation. She’s like the Wayne Gretzky of dad jokes, too.
Being as easily amused as I am*, I’m a great audience for all of her humor, which is delightful for both of us.
She’s also incredibly creative, and loves to make cute, clever things.
Yesterday, she came home from the craft store with a bag of, well, elf parts.
“What are you going to do with a bag of elf parts?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“You know how people take selfies?” She said.
“Yes…”
“Well, if an elf did that, it would be called an elfie, so I’m going to make dioramas of an elf and his friends having a night out, and I’m going to use my cell phone to take pictures of them that he took himself.”
“That’s brilliant,” I said.
“Guess how much this bag of stuff cost?” She said.
I looked at the bag. It was fairly full of elf parts, and it looked like there were some googly eyes, reindeer parts, and a few other Christmas items inside.
“Um … thirty dollars?”
“You’d think so, right? And if it was thirty dollars, you’d think ‘wow, that’s totally worth thirty dollars.'”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking, yes.”
“Well, it was actually …” she paused dramatically, “eight dollars and eleven cents.”
“BAM!” I said. “You you got thirty dollars of elf in an eight dollar bag, is what you’re saying.”
“Exactly.”
She took the elf parts out of the bag, and got to work assembling them. A little while later, she brought an assembled elf into my office to show it to me.
“So I can put his little hand out like this,” she demonstrated, “and hold the camera out like this,” she held it up, “and it totally looks like he’s taking an elfie.”
“That’s rad,” I said.
I didn’t see her for close to four hours while she built more figures, set up construction paper for a backdrop, and took about a dozen elfies.
I loved the recent Big Bang Theory where everyone imagined what their lives would be like without Sheldon.
I was completely surprised to see that I was on the friendship web that Amy made, though, and when this came up on the screen, there was much rejoicing and squeeing in Castle Wheaton.
All these pictures, except the Maltese Failure, can be embiggened by clicking on them.
